'Islamist terror is little threat to the West, and Saudis are backing Iraqi jihad': is this former spy chief right?

On Monday afternoon, Richard Dearlove, the former director of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) gave a public speech to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.

After leaving his post under the cloud of Iraq, Dearlove became master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Last summer, he briefly hit the headlines when when he threated to publicise his account of the run-up to the invasion “depending on what Chilcot publishes” – a reference to the Chilcot Inquiry into the war, which was due three years ago and may now only be released in the next parliament.

Dearlove’s short speech on Monday is now likely to put him straight back into the headlines, as well as to irritate his former colleagues in the intelligence services and the Government itself.

He argued that the West has drastically exaggerated the threat posed by Islamist terrorism, and that a sectarian civil war between Shia and Sunni Muslims means that Europe and the United States are increasingly incidental “bystanders”. Dearlove estimated that whereas the three government intelligence agencies had never devoted more than 38 percent of their resources to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, they had allowed counter-terrorism to absorb well over half their budgets since 9/11 – even though Irish nationalist terrorism had killed more British civilians and soldiers than Al Qaida.

It’s particularly worth noting that Dearlove’s speech included an extraordinary anecdote to support his claim that intra-Muslim sectarian wars have redirected jihadists' attention to Middle Eastern states rather than the West. He recounts Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s head of intelligence until April, telling him before 9/11: “The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally 'God help the Shia’. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.”

Dearlove notes the “chilling” tone to Bandar’s warning, observes that Riyadh is “deeply attracted to any militancy which can effectively challenge Shia-dom”, and proceeds to blame the kingdom for turning a “blind eye” to vast sums of finance that have propelled jihadists to success in western and northern Iraq over the past month. “Such things do not happen spontaneously.”

Dearlove’s claims might be contested. For instance, US government estimates suggest that the jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) have been financially self-sufficient for many years. But regardless of whether he is right or wrong, these are exceptionally strong words for a former intelligence chief.

Recall that in 2006, Saudi Arabia pressured the Blair government into shutting a down an inquiry into alleged Saudi bribes paid to BAE, on pain of ending counter-terrorism co-operation. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, then Britain's ambassador to Riyadh, warned at the time that “the threats to national and international security were very grave”, such that “British lives on British streets would be at risk”. The Cabinet Secretary wrote that Saudi Arabia was “a key partner in the fight against Islamic terrorism”.

For someone of Dearlove’s status to cast Saudi Arabia in such a critical light is therefore highly unusual. It will almost certainly worsen the Government’s already severe angst over the state of the UK’s relations with Gulf monarchies and complicate its frantic efforts to appease Riyadh et al. What’s more, Saudi Arabia is notoriously poor at distinguishing between the actions of a government and those of others. Remember when it threatened sanctions against the Netherlands for an MP’s anti-Islamic stickers, or when it blew a gasket at the Foreign Affairs Committee’s inquiry into UK-Saudi relations two years ago? Riyadh might well vent its anger at Dearlove towards the government.

But is Dearlove correct that Al Qaida’s “shock troops”, as he puts it, are being redirected away from the West and towards “Muslim on Muslim” violence? To some extent, this is clearly so. IS and its ilk are probably more interested in the proximate and more vulnerable targets around Iraq – Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and even Iran and Turkey – than they are in Europe or the United States. They will certainly be bogged down in their state-building enterprise in Iraq and Syria for a long time to come. Their limited capabilities make it so.

But the West retains a special allure for these extremists. Considering that Iran is actively and heavily engaged in military operations against jihadists in Iraq – its first acknowledged military casualty there came just days ago – the reaction to its intervention is nothing compared to the outrage that would erupt were a Western nation to conduct airstrikes. It is easy to imagine such a process swiftly transforming sectarian and parochial antipathies into more familiar, threatening ones.